Memeorandum

March 05, 2019

The Center-Left Flees The Field

Ross Douthat on the collapse of the center left. He makes a good point: The Rubinomics "center-left" focused on economics issues, such as trade, tax reform and health care but unlike Bill Clinton were silent on cultural issues.

Ross barely mentions the great trainwreck of the day, which has also been the trainwreck in Europe, to wit, immigration, especially illegal immigration. He does say this:

But then consider a third distillation, a third narrative, in which the center-left’s signal political failure was that it never really sought to preserve a cultural centrism, which meant over time that its party’s approach to social issues has been dictated more and more completely by the left. In this story the political success of Bill Clinton reflected not only his compromises with Republicans on taxes and spending, his tacit nods to Reaganomics, but also his ability to infuse a centrist liberalism with reassuring nods to various kinds of moderate cultural conservatism — the school uniform and v-chip business and the rhetoric of “safe, legal and rare” on abortion, the easy Baptist religiosity, the tacitly center-right positions on immigration and crime and same-sex marriage.

If Clinton had matched this cultural conservatism with decency in his private life, Al Gore would have won re-election as his heir and the larger story of the center-left might have been entirely different. But instead, from the mid-2000s onward, the leftward flank of the Democratic Party looked at the country’s changing demographics and growing social liberalism and decided that Clinton’s compromises with cultural conservatism weren’t as politically necessary as they had been (which was true), and that therefore they were free to become increasingly ideologically maximalist on everything touching gender or race or sexuality or immigration (which was … not true).

Team Rubinomics fled the field on immigration, which has clear economic and cultural components. As an example, in 2006 Krugman briefly touched the third rail and acknowledged, citing Borjas, that unskilled immigrants (legal or otherwise) depress the wages of the native unskilled.

By 2017 Krugman had more comforting studies and realized that such a conclusion was "wrong", although the once-admired Borjas continues to push it. Thank heaven for the liberal take-over of academia!

So what happened? Please. Peter Beinart explains the obvious - faith in their emerging Democacratic majority and rising political correctness pushed the Democrats to their current "Stop hating, hater" position on illegal immigration.

A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”

Let's not overlook Big Business, which had sway with both Democrats and the Chamber of Commerce Republicans:

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.

The experience of unreconstructed socialist Bernie Sanders was instructive:

This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”

Say what?!? Americans first?

Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”

"Proven incorerect"! Yet as a political theory it worked for Trump and here we are. Beinart goes on:

But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”

It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.

There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.

Wow. How could so many be so wrong? Beinart mentions that some academics are funded by, eg, Microsoft. But his second point will surprise no one:

Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”

Beinart goes on to float all sorts of proposals that would address the conflicting concerns of two groups the Democrats claim to care about, unskilled natives and immigrants. That is a conversation a center-left could lead, but it won't be happening. Lest you trail off before what seems to be his punchline I will put it here:

Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.

Promoting assimilation neednot mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.

As if. Beinart goes on:

The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.

Uh huh.

Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them.

Oh, "English spoken here". That will happen.

And if you have made it this far:

Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.

n 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?

Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

He may be right about Clinton winning but obviously she didn't and couldn't say those things within her party today.

Kind of grim - when the proposed solutions are this far from possible for the Democrats one wonders where we are headed.

Senate Republicans are not voting on constitutionality or precedent, they are voting on desperately needed Border Security & the Wall. Our Country is being invaded with Drugs, Human Traffickers, & Criminals of all shapes and sizes. That’s what this vote is all about. STAY UNITED!

I think the comments of admiration. and praise we have all expressed would be a wonderful gift to Mrs Daddy and his girls.
The other posts I would refrain from publishing unless a request is made to see them.
I understand OL’s point completely.
Some posters here drink every day.
I have more concern for them than daddy.

When we met, I think we had 2 beers. Most pilots are always in control. It is part of the makeup. My brother's ass is so tight a gnat's eyelash wouldn't pass through. But he is a hell of a pilot.

There are the others who we read about in the papers, and there are those victims of alcoholism at the same rate as the general population, I would imagine. But pilot physicals are serious, and I believe Rob had had one not too long ago.

he was always in control.

One of the downsides about the job is being alone in a lot of cities for layovers. You often don't know the guy(s) you are flying with. And so you find yourself alone with a lot of time on your hands. Maybe you have dinner with your co-pilot.

My brother walks; insanely. He loves to do a loop of Central Park when he's laying over there. Or maybe from Battery Park to Midtown to the Upper East Side. Not so much when he's in Houston or Quito or Chicago.

Daddy read. When I met him he was at the bar with a book and a beer. And that is the way I will always remember him. Not a damn thing wrong with that. I like the way he rolled.

Coming back from a run to Publix in Flagler Beach, I had Rush on. Rush was using his "stream of consciousness" method to outline how he sees Impeachment, and Trial unfolding. The Rand Paul led blockage of the Emergency powers is a trial balloon. If he can get 8-10 other Repukes to vote along with him and the Dems, then you are getting close to 60 votes against Trump, now, maybe in the future.

Rush also reminded us that Trump under Section 8 of the US Code can just shutdown the border, and all immigration. SCOTUS already approved the travel ban in Trump v. Hawaii. Hell, Obama shutdown Iraqi immigration and visits without even telling Congress, and Carter the same with the Iranians.

But Rush is very concerned that Trump doesn't have his own party behind him as the Dems did with Zippy and Clenis. Dangerous territory. I think Rush is preparing his audience, and Trump's base for more than an 81 witness dog, and pony show.

It's not, OL. It was worth pointing out, though I don't think any of us would have been so oafish as to send something to his family that would have upset them.

As to how much time he spent with us, remember, a lot of that was on the road. My only concern would be that if we draw too much attention to the blog, his family might start going through it themselves. They may do that anyway, and in all likelihood would understand his sense of humor and not find any of it upsetting, but I agree with you that I wouldn't want to be part of facilitating that.

I don't think any of us would have been so oafish as to send something to his family that would have upset them.

But that's a subjective judgement and, as OL said, might point out time which they would have preferred being spent with them. What was written on the blog should stay on the blog. A condolence card with a personal message would be the right vehicle.

Mant regular commenters tend to have times they are most likely to post. With jim and rich it is late at night and a'mom especially posts before dawn.

I think those of us on the east coast will miss what ever daddy put up overnight followed by his statement that now he was going to sleep.

I usually turn on the computer while I make a pot of tea and see what is new. Many a time I have read something he posted and wished he had not essentially signed out for a while. Just like I want to check on the UK first thing to see what has happened overseas while I slept.

You forget that Mike Pence was my governor. He was in trouble here because of ham-handed cultural stuff he pushed with little regard for diplomacy, plus he holed up in his office and didn't get out and meet regular people much.

The reason he is our vice president is because Trump needed someone conservative to calm the fears of those who thought Trump would be too liberal, as well as Pence grabbing at a life-preserver.

I am telling you that "regular guy", as Buckeye says, has a deep emotional connection to Donald Trump. They don't simply like him for his good policies and results. They LOVE him. I mean they really, really LOVE him.

I do not think a bunch of corrupt senators being paid off by the Koch brothers and the Chamber of Commerce are ready to withstand the fury of regular guy. And it will be fury.

Cap'n "Exactly, Buckeye. Nullifying the votes of 63 million people won't produce good results."

You know, sometimes I think we ought to just get it on now rather than later...now we have more than 63M, and we have Trump. The truly remarkable thing is Trump comes to work everyday with a smile on his face. Imagine the life he would have if he just said "This what you want? Really? I'm outta here...have a nice life."

We get the Senators and Representatives we vote for.
Every election counts.That is why state politics and local politics are so important.
We fight them at the ballot box and stop the vote harvesting and illegals voting.
This is where the difference in victory or defeat takes place.

MM:
It doesn’t matter what the average guy thinks or what he knows about civics.
The Constitution is the law of the land.
Obama was called to task by the courts when he violated the Constitution.
But Repubs gave him a pass on everything
When it comes to succession,the Constitution is clear.

Buckeye:
It is too close to a dictatorship for my taste.Obama’s pen and phone was deplored by everyone here. One person can have great ideas but needs a good team to bring them to fruition.
I didn’t vote for a dictator .
I voted for a leader who would work with others to effect change.

Maryrose "This is a hypothetical which isn’t going to happen. But the way our system of government is set up,succession to the presidency is already in place. Insurrection wont change that."

You are trying to have it both ways, Maryrose. You imagine that half the country can throw out a properly elected person who won fair and square under the rules because they don't like him - which means they have torn up the rules themselves and having their own insurrection - then you propose that the rest of the people, well, play by the other rules after they pocket their winning from breaking those rules.

Now that is the GOP roadmap for everything else so I get your point. I'm just saying 63M+ energetic winners are not likely to be so docile.

They can express all the fury they want.
If he is voted out by impeachment then the Vice President takes his place.

Impeached for what? You're operating in a Maxine Waters world where impeachment just happens because. There are very specific things that are impeachable offenses and I've not heard Trump be associated with any of them. Slick lost his law license for lying under oath in a civil proceeding and suborning perjury; granted that's like me losing a license to construct a neutron bomb but he was still guilty of something in a federal court. What crime had Trump committed?

CH:
I have already stated they don’t have 10 more senators to make this happen.
If there is insurrection, it happens in the Senate first.Senators will have to square their vote with their constituents.
If enough can be convincing in their argument for impeachment, then it happens.
Right now DEMs don’t have the numbers.
That is why the 2020 election is so important and gaining more Senate seats vital.

Cap'n "There are very specific things that are impeachable offenses and I've not heard Trump be associated with any of them."

Actually that is precisely the problem. The constitution is quite vague in that, more or less summarized as "whatever the House says it is". "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" is, sadly, not a defined term.

@VickiMcKenna
California Judge Finds That Census Citizenship Question "Threatens Foundation" Of US Democracy”. How? Because asking someone if they are a citizen makes it hard to find out how many citizens we have. You read that right.

Where were Paul and the concerned constitutionalist GOP senators when Zippy used Emergency powers? I think Rush is right. Trump needs his party to support him without question on this immigration issue. But they have decided to be contrarian?

He doesn't have his party's support in the Senate but then again, I would not consider the likes of Murkowski, Collins, Alexander to be in line with Trump's goals.

Sorry, Iggy, but I disagree with your comment about "nonsense of stilts". If he can't win this issue in a GOP Senate says less about his leadership then the Senate's leanings. Not good.

Climate change is about how people consume energy, which we all do in one way or another 24/7. The problem is us, and that means we must also be part of the solution. We can’t say that experts, maybe the government, will take care of everything. Silver buckshot added to silver bullets—every tool in the tool box, a big bag of human changes—might.

[...]

How do we overcome these hardwired instincts? That’s a question more behavioral scientists—in academia, industry, and in the realm of policy—need to put at the top of their agenda, working to formulate concrete, practical ideas for policymakers to put into action. Answers (and hope) will come from groups working across disciplines who can show us the way from our unsustainable behavior today to an existence that’s viable for generations to come.

Yes, we deplorables must be shown "the way from our unsustainable behavior today to an existence that’s viable for generations to come." If ever there was confirmation that climate change is the heavy artillery in the war on capitalism, and therefore the war on liberty!

Here's the clincher:

Ruth Greenspan Bell is an expert in governance issues inherent in managing greenhouse gas emissions, domestically and internationally. With Elke Weber of Princeton, she leads a program to harvest insights from behavioral science research for re-motivating how humans engage with energy. She is a long-standing member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The author is not a climate scientist. Her expertise is in the use of climate science in the formulation of government policy, and more importantly, of international policy. Let me just go out on a limb here and suggest that, internationally oriented though she may be, the author is not aiming her intellectual artillery at China.

It is shameful that House Democrats won’t take a stronger stand against Anti-Semitism in their conference. Anti-Semitism has fueled atrocities throughout history and it’s inconceivable they will not act to condemn it!

If by that you mean "he will work with others to assemble a winning number of votes"...sure.

If instead you mean "reach across the aisle and settle in the middle", then that not only was an unrealistic hope for a leader with principles, but a dangerous one. When good splits the difference with evil, evil pockets the half then works on the other half.

JIB
You are right.
It is not good.
But President Trump can veto this bill and continue with his emergency declaration.
Senators not running for re-election don’t have allegiance to anyone.
Alexander has made his positions clear.